


Dragon Slayer

by worddancer



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: AU, Cassandra Graves is a complicated woman and I love her, F/M, Found Family, Gen, George the Slave Slayer, Jack the Giantkiller, Laney becoming Laney, Laney is the dragon slayer, Liam the Pied Piper, Not really any major ships, what if
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 03:38:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15234501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worddancer/pseuds/worddancer
Summary: When her tribe staked her out on the sand dune there was no blacksmith to press her a knife but not reasons. Laney did not scream and cry when she saw the red colored lot in her hand. She did not fight the men of the tribe as they brought her to the highest dune near the oasis. She was her mother's daughter and her mother’s daughter did not let her enemies see her cry. Laney Jones wasn’t born with steel in her spine but she watched her mother long enough to find it.Laney did not have a blacksmith to press her a knife, and she had not once in her life asked for reasons but she had a brother who could whistle the world on his voice and a  desire to be more than a failed peace maker. Laney had been pressing her hands against the walls of the universe for years and there was just enough wiggle in her hands to steal magic from the air.





	Dragon Slayer

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream about Laney being the dragon slayer and then my brain wouldn't shut up so here this is. Comments are always appreciated. I'm not super happy with the ending but what's a girl to do.

When the dragon came to the desert Aisling Jones stood as tall as her body allowed and announced they would draw lots for the sacrifice. In the mountains or in the desert sands one life was always the price for twenty plus. 

One life unwillingly given is never worth the sacrifice but Aisling Jones had peace to sow and tents to sew and one daughter left. One daughter out of twenty children. She didn’t believe Laney would draw the short straw.

When her tribe staked her out on the sand dune there was no blacksmith to press her a knife but not reasons. Laney did not scream and cry when she saw the red colored lot in her hand. She did not fight the men of the tribe as they brought her to the highest dune near the oasis. She was her mother's daughter and her mother’s daughter did not let her enemies see her cry. Laney Jones wasn’t born with steel in her spine but she watched her mother long enough to find it.

Her mother held her back own ramrod straight as she watched her daughter be led, not dragged, away. She walked back to her tent where Laney’s perfect stitches gleamed in the noon sun and broke. 

Laney did not have a blacksmith to press her a knife, and she had not once in her life asked for reasons but she had a brother who could whistle the world on his voice and a desire to be more than a failed peace maker. Laney had been pressing her hands against the walls of the universe for years and there was just enough wiggle in her hands to steal magic from the air. 

Laney was 16 and already too big for the endless desert sky but didn’t know where else to go. 

She began to weave a net out of stolen power. When it came time for the dragon to devour her she had a net, a back up and a prayer she’d never admit to whispering. When the gods abandon you to be devoured as a penance for a sin you haven’t even had the chance to commit you stop admitting to your faith in them. You start rebuilding your faith in yourself. 

She threw the net over the dragon with every borrowed and stolen spell she knew. Her brother could have talked to him, her mother would have stood straight and stared her duty in the eye, her father would have fought with only the power he had been given. Laney walked back to the tribe and demanded her pistols. She walked back to the dune, her tribe behind her and shot the dragon through the eye. 

She waited until she was several dunes away before she began to cry. Never let your enemies see you break. 

Laney was never meant to build peace but she could build safety and she held onto that. 

In her tent, tucked into her bedroll were applications to an Academy a lifetime away. In another life she went there and saved the world. In this life she began searching for the only person who it might be safe to break in front of. She still ended up in the Academy walls. She was always meant to save the world.

High in the mountains there were already whispers of the Pied Piper, the Giant Killer and the Slave Slayer. Hero’s always needed names in order for ballads to be sung. A desert man who whistled the world to his lips fell in love with a baker who was a general, who was a hero, who was someone who lost someone. A forest boy who wanted so badly to matter more than being the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son who was brave because the songs taught him how, because he wanted to save the world, because he wanted to matter. A girl who kept nothing from her village but her name after they sold an orphan mage to the slavers to survive a particularly cruel winter. She tracked them down and killed each one of them before they could reach the Seeress’s dungeons. 

One unwilling life is never worth the twenty plus that are willing to sacrifice it. 

One life is always worth twenty.

One life is never worth twenty. 

Laney didn’t know who the Pied Piper was but she knew a boy who might be a man now who could whistle the world and a bakery is as good a home as any.

“What did you do when you killed the dragon?”

“I burned him.”

In the desert they filled the skies with their mourning. Laney didn’t know if she mourned for the dragon or the loss of her place in her own life. Either way she waited two sand dunes before she let the tears fall down her face. Either way she walked back to her tribe after shooting the dragon with spelled bullets and packed her things and left. 

In Rivertown she met a woman who helped smuggle mages out of the mountains, who juggled fire in the town square, who wore bits of colored string around her belt. 

“Jones?” Sez asked, “I think I’ve heard of a Jones in the mountains. Looking for your brother you say?”

“I’m looking for something.” Laney said in a moment of honesty. She watched a boy in an academy jacket stand just outside the light of Sez’s dancing torches. She saw the band around his arm that proclaimed Hero. She wondered if he saw her watching him. She wondered if she would have sent in her application if the dragon never came. 

She wondered why she sent one in with a blank return address from the first town outside of the desert sands.

He did. Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh paid attention. He saw the dark black girl with perfectly braided hair talk to his best friend. He waited until she was finished before approaching to find out where the latest monster that went bump in the night needed to be slayed.

He pretended not to notice the girl following him. After all it was just possible enough that they just happened to be traveling the same path. 

Liam had always meant to come home, Laney had always been built for breaking. Both had their mother’s steel in their spines. Both refused to leave someone in trouble. 

When the Thing in the Darkness almost had Rupert around the throat she stepped out of her own shadows and shot it three times with guns both spelled with stolen magic and blessed with dragon blood. 

“Thank you.” Rupert said stiffly. 

“Laney Jones,” he said after a few nights of hunting, “We received a mage application with no return address from a girl with that name. Where should we send the acceptance letter to?”

Laney thought of her tribe with her mother's steel spine, lots of straws with one tipped red, of one life for twenty plus, of the dragons blood staining the sand and burning it into glass. She thought of her brother leaving and her failure to be a peacemaker, she thought how the sand dunes seemed like another word for trapped. She thought of the dragons ash filling the sky. She thought about how sometimes the air tasted like smoke and ash and sand trapped in her lungs.

In the desert we fill the sky with our mourning.

“Nowhere. Here. Anywhere.” she replied. 

Do you have a home when you burn it to the ground metaphorically instead of being burned yourself literally?

“Well we are only a week into the semester. It’s understandable how a mage could get lost traveling to school.” Rupert mentioned.

“Yes I suppose it is.”

Laney had meant to leave everything behind in the desert. She did not expect how much she would take. Jack wasn’t the only one who wanted to matter. Laney wanted to matter more than being a sacrifice. Killing the dragon was the most honest thing she’d ever done and she slotted that knowledge like she slotted her guns back into their holster. She wanted to matter and she was never built for sowing peace. She built and she broke. 

Sometimes she woke tucked into her dorm with Gloria, the little sage who was too bright and too cheerful to startle awake at the sound of nightmares. Some nights Laney woke feeling the mix of sand and ash choke her lungs and leave her burned out and dry.

In the mountains sometimes George woke to the sound of a boar spear driving its way through flesh and the taste of blood drowning her lungs. In both worlds they carry the weight of their choices. In both worlds they would make the choices again. People are not meant to be unwilling sacrifices.

Some still choose to sacrifice everything but their lives.

Laney was not willing to die for her tribe but she was willing to fight for them and that mattered.

George would never be willing to let someone die for her and that mattered too. 

Maybe in this reality Liam never died. George spent months tracking slavers, not dragons and she knows how human nightmares move. She sees the shadow and pushes Liam and the child out of the way. A bullet breaks glass and there is no weeping widow. Maybe Jacks luck wraps itself around his friends, no one pushes the Pied Piper out of the way but a window still breaks and no widow weeps. 

Maybe some events are fixed points in any universe. Maybe no matter what death or nightmare keeps you company there is always more death and more nightmares to come. Maybe a bullet makes the wet sound of piercing flesh, a widow weeps like broken glass and a child is saved but a husband is lost. 

Maybe Jack still leaves, he always left until he learned how to stay. He travels to the Academy with the careful application Sarge helped him fill out, a green badge waiting to his shame. He sees his roommate wrapped in books and blankets to keep the rest of the world away. He sees the boy who toured him around the campus- a paper pusher and nothing else. Jack was still learning to pay attention. He hears of Laney Jones. The mage with the worst grip in her class.

He couldn’t see the ash staining her hands or the way she watched the room, back tucked carefully against a wall, because he was too busy drowning in his own grief. His own disappointments. One day he would learn to look.

Jack was still learning to pay attention- he sat across a young woman in a mountain inn and doesn’t think the boogeyman could look so pleasant. He gives her his name. 

Cassandra Graves spent her childhood keeping one boy safe at the cost of hundred. If it was to be her life's work it would be her life's work. Her father made her say good bye to her nurse before the guards dragged her away. She heard the whispers of monster from her father's lips, from the guards, from the things she saw. But her father was a genius and people bought their product and even sold them their children. Her brother was her greatest sin and he was safe. 

Hundreds of lives for one.

Hundreds of lives for warmth, for keeping the winter outside the door, for profit.

What does the monster under the bed fear? Bakers and Pipers and Slayers and Giantkillers? Boys with faith in their eyes who give their story along with their name? A brother who glows so bright it blinds her and father who hates so much it might as well be a black hole?

She cleaned the ash from the cages. 

She knew the name of every soul she sent to her father's dungeons and she told herself she always slept soundly at night. After all it was the only way.

In a forgotten room, in a forgotten lab, in a building that was bigger than remembered the word “childhood" tripped and died on Rupert's lips. A demon foraged in the loss of innocence is still a nightmare. A bullet still thudded through wet flesh and a widow still wept.

She said Laney Jones was the least sensitive person she’d seen- especially after her brothers light and gold stained whistle. She saw how much the Giantkiller loved this new army he created. She saw his burned away luck.

She saw the dragons ash on Laney’s skin.

She didn’t see stolen magic.

When Jack tripped into Rupert's private battle Laney was already there with freshly cleaned pistols. 

“I told you he’d come after Sally-Ane’s.” Laney said easily, hair still perfectly braided as she accepted the oversized helm from Rupert’s steady hands.

“I know, you pay attention.” Rupert said. They’d been monster hunting for almost a year together before this forest boy stumbled into their friendship. Rupert always guarded his left flank a little more than his right until a few weeks after Jack joined their quest. 

He remembered which sword Jack liked best after the first fight.

Maybe in this world Rupert is a little less careful and Laney is a little more fragile. Maybe he sees her break six months into her first year, after they talk about dragons in Group Cohesion class. Maybe he sees her spine go rigid and follows her after class to the edge of campus, to the tallest tree that is still like a ladder compared to the palm trees of the desert she used to call home. 

Falling is the bravest thing he knew Liam used to tell her. 

He never dreamed she’d stop falling. 

He had also always meant to come home to a desert, to a bakery, to a sister, to a wife, to a daughter.

Maybe in this world Rupert watches Laney break and shatter 20 feet above the ground in an old oak tree. Maybe she lets him sit beside her and help her hold all her pieces together. In any world Laney is the one who kisses him first. No matter how less careful Rupert can be he’s always a little too careful. He pays attention to everything but his own feelings. Those he carefully sorts and slots in to their labeled box in his mind. He never dreams Laney has a similar box labeled Rupert. 

In this world Jack still fits into their group, they learn to watch their sides a little less and his a little more. They bandage themselves up in Jack’s room because he always has a few supplies from his afternoons with Nurse tucked away. Grey sits on his bed and whispers facts and figures before trailing along because he knows things and for once it might keep someone safe. Laney notices when his books shift to the things they fight in the darkness.

Laney knows what heartbreak and running away looks like in this world more intimately than she does in any other. She sees Grey wear the whispers of the mountains in his bones but she lets him keep his secrets. After all- she never told him about the dragon. Whispers of the Dragon Slayer are much quieter than the whispers of the Slave Slayer. One disappeared into a city and one stood tall in the mountains both fighting a war they never signed up for and never could walk away from. 

No matter what world they become family, they climb a mountain, face a monster, lose a friend only to find him again.

The wet thud of a bullet, a widow weeping like broken glass. A hero who holds everyone together, a guide who’s a hero, a sage who’s a mage and a magicless mage. No matter what world their in they find each other.


End file.
